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FIRST THING IN THE morning I bought a heavy-duty combination bicycle lock at a hardware store and set it with my birth date numbers. I was pleased to find it fit snuggly around the half-inch iron rails of the back gate and its supporting structure, making life considerably tougher for the vandals.
Pascaline met me in the stone hallway to announce the workers had arrived at 9:10 a.m. "For front," she told me with German-like crispness. "Back–nine two two." She stared at me so expectantly I felt obligated to write the figures down.
"Merci," I told her sincerely. "I’ll go meet them right away."
The three masons struck me as bovine and witless. As I had guessed, the courtyard wall was a job for two and they seemed to trip over each other. I expected their work to take all day, but you never know. By noon they had moved on to the planter that had been dumped.
The plumbers were not due until the next day, but the two tile men arrived to repair the patio where the visitor had slipped. They worked in quick awkward movements, their scrawny elbows jabbing the air as they threw broken tiles into a heap. Both wore white undershirts and jeans and talked simultaneously in Italian. There was no interrupting their incomprehensible dialog, and Pascaline and I quickly felt like unwelcome witnesses to a ritual. The cook mumbled an excuse and slipped away, and I soon did the same.
I was quite eager to read Marsford’s will, which Tom had told me I’d find in the tower storeroom file cabinet. Considering my suspicions, I was gratified to see it was an unalterable carbon copy helpfully numbered 1 of 14, 2 of 14, and so on.
Next I dug out Tom’s inventory, a comprehensive text bound in a heavy brown folder, and toted my reading material up to a canvas chair on the sunlit roof.
Hugh’s will proved to be the tedious, overly detailed document wills always are, but for once I was grateful for the attorney’s thoroughness. My chore was to see whether it specified anything that wasn’t on the inventory, or vice versa. It was a complicated job, but I soon devised a system.
By page six I was well on my way to a sunburn, and Pascaline was probably holding lunch. I took the papers to my room and stashed them temporarily in my suitcase. Lunch was a crisp salad dressed with oil and vinegar, a platter of cold ham with potato salad, and chilled white wine. I convinced myself I deserved every delicious bite.
The Turk's Den felt surprisingly cool when I returned, so I settled into the paisley cushions to finish my chore. When my eyes needed a rest, I treated myself to a look at the beach. No use denying it–I hoped for another glimpse of Samantha.
Beach towels were laid out like a third-grader's stamp album, but I had no difficulty spotting the tomato-red bikini. Her hair was up in a knot today, the bikini top securely in place. Lying on her stomach, her head pillowed on her arms, she appeared to be asleep. To me she looked like a child accidentally blessed with a Barbie-doll body. I subjected myself to several minutes of a well-deserved guilty conscience before slinking back inside.
Another forty-five minutes and I’d finished comparing the inventory and the will. Everything from Alabaster vase to Zebra (jade, variegated) checked out. I congratulated myself on having done an excellent job of learning nothing.
At a leisurely pace I re-read the last page, which contained Marsford’s ambiguous poem. The first time through I thought it was just nutty nonsense. During the second reading my imagination began to play tricks on me, and the possibilities that suddenly read themselves into the poem made my palms sweat.
Ignore the objects life assembles,
There's a secret wealth they won't resemble.
Past the pretty front you see,
Past the poem from even me,
Inner beauty,
Inner wealth–
Contrived with utmost care and stealth
Yearly work to a final end–
This legacy's best of all, my friend.
Marsford could have been lecturing his offspring that hard work was the most rewarding aspect of life. He also may have been scolding them for being useless and totally dependent on his support.
Living here among his work, absorbing a sense of his strong and often unkind view of others, I had a suspicion he also may have counted on his children’s greed to provide him with a last laugh. Since they were given generous allowances, initially they had no incentive to look beyond the stated bequests. Years or even decades may have gone by before another meaning to his poem occurred to anyone.
The elimination of the heirs' allowances only months ago could easily have sparked a renewed interest in his assets. It may also have prompted the recent vandalism at the chateau. I just couldn’t imagine Marsford’s elderly children bothering with such a long shot at this point.
I stood staring out to sea from my favorite vantage point in the weedy garden and saw nothing. My mind took turns soaring and landing flat. Suppose Tom was right about Marsford having falsified the price of several art objects in order to conceal an underground fund. I didn’t know what Hugh received for the sale of his mountain, but it wasn’t hard to imagine it providing a sizeable "secret wealth."
Inner beauty,
Inner wealth–
Contrived with utmost care and stealth...
Meticulous care had gone into everything Marsford did, from the contouring of his garden to the disguising of a drainpipe. Large or small, his affinity for detail was evident everywhere, but especially in his will. Was it camouflage calculated to obscure the meaning of his poem? Or were the listings themselves important for what they hid?
I began to think my clerical job was just a starting point, the first step in a trail "contrived with utmost care and stealth."
Yearly work to a final end–
This legacy's best of all, my friend.
The brass plaque outside of Marsford's studio flashed into my mind. On it was another clumsy poem and the year 1948. “One of his yearly projects,” Tom mentioned in his usual offhand manner.
Hugh Marsford might as well have whispered his scheme straight into my ear. I released my grip on the stone wall and laughed out loud.
Only two things kept me from running around the chateau like a kid on an Easter-egg hunt–the workmen I didn’t trust and Samantha Carlisle. Standing like Athena poised for battle, she glared up at me from the beach.